Pushed
by dharmamonkey
Summary: In the wake of his father's death, Booth reflects on his earliest childhood memories, both good and bad, and on what those memories mean for him as he and Brennan look forward to the birth of their daughter. Episode tag "Male in the Mail" (7x4).


**Pushed**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rated:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those little moments that Hart and friends leave out.

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**A/N:** _"Male in the Mail" was a terrific episode—probably my favorite of all of Season 7—but it left me wanting to see more of how Booth would sort through the psychic baggage of dealing with his memories of his father. Of course, the show moved on, and to date, we haven't really gotten any of that. What follows is my attempt to fill in some of the gaps._

_Merry Christmas, everyone!_

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My earliest memory of my father is of being pushed.

I remember sitting on a swing feeling him send me in higher and higher arcs until the tips of my toes brushed across the leaves of the lowest-hanging branches of the tree behind our duplex. I remember the way his big hand felt pressing gently against the small of my little boy back, and I remember the reddish-purple color of the leaves on the tree.

I must have been about three years old. We were living in base housing at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where my dad was a helicopter pilot in the Army's 101st Aviation Group. I have a good idea how old I was at the time because my dad did two tours in Vietnam, one in 1969 and another in 1972, and we moved to Pittsburgh in 1974 after my dad's discharge from the Army. Our row house in Polish Hill didn't have a backyard, so the memory has to be from when we were still living at Fort Campbell, but after Dad's second tour in Vietnam.

I don't remember much about the time we lived in Polish Hill. Like a lot of Vietnam vets at the time, Dad struggled to find work after getting out of the Army, and ended up going to barber's school while my mom did seamstressing and sold advertising jingles she wrote. We'd just moved there when Jared was born. Dad finished barber's school and started cutting hair, which enabled Mom to spend more time with us and less time hemming pants and sitting at our old upright piano singing about fried pork rinds and car wax. I was too little to understand it at the time, but Dad really resented having to resort to trade like barbering after spending the better part of ten years as a Army warrant officer flying expensive aircraft in high-risk combat missions. After a while, I guess, Dad resigned himself to cutting hair for a living and, for a time at least, things were pretty stable for us. He started making decent enough money that we were able to move out of the run-down old row house in Polish Hill and out to the suburbs on the northwest side of Pittsburgh where they found a small two-story house with a little backyard and a big maple tree in front.

Some of my most vivid childhood memories are from that house in Brighton Heights—some of my best memories, and, without a doubt, some of the worst.

I remember my dad taking me to a frozen pond down the road from our house and teaching me to ice-skate. I was six years old, and like any little kid just learning to skate, I fell down a lot, but Dad would help me back up and set me back on my skates, again and again, and by the end of that day, I could skate all the way around the pond without falling. He took me skating at that pond quite a bit that winter, and I loved it. I loved skating. I loved the speed, the cool air on my face, and the clicking, hissing sound of the skates as they cut a path over the ice.

It got so cold that winter that the Ohio River, which was down the hill just a few blocks away from our neighborhood parish church, actually froze over and I got to skate up and down the river for what seemed like miles. God, I loved it. I skated my little ass off that winter. I got good enough at skating that the next year, my mom signed me up to play ice hockey in a local kids' league. I was really fired up to play hockey, a sport I'd loved to watch on TV—and, on rare occasion, in person, when Dad would get tickets to see the Penguins play at the Civic Arena—and I was so excited to have my dad see me play. I wanted him to be there when I scored my first goal. If not, then I'd hoped he'd be there when I scored my first hat trick. In any event, I just wanted him to watch me play, to cheer me on.

But he never came.

My mom died two weeks before Thanksgiving that year. It was a sudden thing, an aneurysm, and my dad was totally unprepared, psychologically or otherwise, to be a widower having to support and take care of two small boys on his own. That's when Dad's drinking started to get really bad. He'd always been a heavy drinker—in retrospect, I'm pretty sure that had something to do with him not being promoted to the next warrant officer grade and ultimately getting bounced from the Army during the post-Vietnam reduction in force—and he would hit Mom sometimes, but he wasn't drunk all the time, and he did a pretty good job keeping it together most of the time. But it wasn't until Mom died when Dad really began to fall apart.

A few months after Mom died, Dad gave up his chair at the barber shop in Brighton Heights and moved us to his hometown of Philadelphia, where his dad, my Pops, knew a guy who knew a guy who needed a good barber. It was when we moved to Philly that things started to get really bad, and Dad started drinking a lot. By the time Easter rolled around that year, he pretty much came home drunk every night.

I remember feeling like the rules all of a sudden changed, but nobody bothered telling us what the new rules were until it was too late and we'd already broken them.

Mom always made us make our beds each morning before school and to clean our rooms on Sunday afternoons after mass. When she died, Dad continued the tradition, but even though Jared and I went about the task of straightening our rooms the same way we did when Mom was alive, it wasn't enough. Whatever we did, it wasn't enough. If I left my comics in disarray on the dresser, or if Jared left a pair of his Batman Underoos draped over the side of his laundry hamper, it was enough to set Dad off. If we grumbled about what we had for dinner—"tuna noodle casserole again, Dad?"—it would set him off. After a few months, it seemed like anything and everything would set him off.

And when he would go off, he went totally off the rails. He'd slap us around the way he used to with Mom when she was alive. He was really rough on her. I remember laying in bed back when we still lived in Pittsburgh and listening to the two of them argue about which bills they'd fallen behind on, how much he was drinking, how much money he'd blown at the weekly card game. The arguments would usually end with a roaring string of curses and a loud _smack_, or a sharp _thunk_ as Dad pushed Mom against the wall of their bedroom. But when Mom died, all that rage had to go somewhere, so he turned it on us—me and Jared. The drunker he was, the harder he'd hit and he'd keep at it, smacking me or Jared around, until we managed to run away or he'd exhaust himself and collapse in a drunken heap on the couch in front of the blaring TV.

The worst was the time when he pushed me down a flight of stairs.

Like usual, it was something small that set him off. I'd left a little bit of a mess on the bathroom floor—sure, it was gross, but I was an eight year-old boy, and I was mid-stream when I got a little distracted by my little brother rummaging through my room—and Dad went off like a Roman candle when he found it. He hollered at me to come out of my room, and I could tell by the way he was bellowing at me that he was furious. At the time, I didn't even know what he was mad at me about. I hesitated to come out of my room, but he barged in there and dragged me out by the wrist. He yelled at me, and I told him I was sorry, that I'd be more careful next time, but he kept yelling at me. I must have made some kind of excuse about Jared going into my room to snatch my Green Lantern comic, and that really set him off.

"You worthless son of a bitch," he said to me. "Can't even take a goddamned piss without someone telling you how to do it. You think I'm here to clean up your fucking mess, Seeley? You think I'm going to clean up after your mess like your mother did?" He grabbed me by the shoulders—I was a strong kid, but I was still just eight years old, and my dad was a big man, probably six feet tall and a good two hundred pounds, and I was like a ragdoll in his hands—and whirled me around, then hissed, "Get out of my sight, you worthless piece of shit."

Then he shoved me down the stairs. I fell, of course, and tried to brace my fall with my hands, which broke my right arm as soon as I hit the hardwood floor at the base of the stairs, right smack dab in front of the front door. I howled with pain, snuffling a bit because my lip had split open in the fall, when my mouth hit the landing of the bottom step. My arm was broken, and I had blood all over the front of my shirt—my favorite Eagles T-shirt, I remember now—and there were tears streaming down my face as Dad made his way down the stairs to yank me to my feet.

In the emergency room, he told them that I'd been chasing my brother around the house and had fallen down the stairs.

It's strange. You'd think that him hurting me that badly—breaking my arm and busting open my lip so that it needed four stitches to close up—would make me more afraid of him.

But it didn't. It was the opposite. Once he hurt me like that, and I endured his abuse like that, then healed up again, I somehow realized that, no matter what he did to me, I would survive it somehow. I'd get through it. If he marked me, or hurt me, I would heal. Him throwing me down that flight of stairs that afternoon emboldened me. Maybe something flickered in the back of his mind after that, and for a little while, he seemed to lighten up on me, and tried to go after Jared instead. But after a couple of weeks, they took the stitches out of my lip and it looked almost like nothing had happened. I'd healed. The next time he went into one of his drunken rages and came after Jared, I decided that I couldn't take it anymore. So, even though I was all of eight years old at the time, I stepped in between Jared and Dad. I stood in front of my little brother, three years younger than me, and I didn't let Dad touch him, which of course only made Dad that much more furious. Even with a broken arm still in a cast, I wouldn't let Dad touch Jared.

And after that day, he didn't.

I took the beatings, over and over again, so that my baby brother could be spared the worst of it. Sometimes he'd hit me in places—like in the stomach or on the back of my head—that wouldn't leave marks that anyone could see. Sometimes he didn't care enough to hide what he'd done. It hurt, sometimes worse than other times, and a couple times I ended up in the emergency room, and Dad would always tell them I'd fallen out of a tree or took a hard hit playing tackle football with the neighborhood kids. I came to hate the hospital, and doctors, and learned to say nothing about my hurts. I learned to take the abuse without him seeing me cry. I learned to be hard. At the age of eight, I learned to endure pain in dignified silence.

I went to school and tried to do my best although I often didn't get my homework done because when I was at home, my priority was keeping an eye peeled for my dad's rages, bracing myself for them when they'd come, and protecting my brother. So while I didn't dislike school, I didn't do very well in school in those years because I had a lot of distractions at home. I just couldn't focus.

Sports became my outlet: football in the fall, hockey in the winter, baseball in the spring, and hockey again in the summer. In sports, I found a safe haven—a place where I could be myself and not get yelled at or smacked around, a place where people praised me when I did well and gave me reassuring encouragement when I didn't, a place where I could pour all of my energy and my hurts into and forget for a while how bad things were at home. I stopped waiting for Dad to come to my games, and began to be glad that he didn't. Home was his space, the place where he raged, but sports was my space, the place where he couldn't touch me. For two years, I took refuge in sports for two hours after school and half the day on Saturday. I'd come home from mass on Sundays, quickly do my chores and slip out with Jared to go to the park while Dad went down to the local bar and grill to drink himself into a stupor since the state-owned liquor stores in Pennsylvania were closed on Sundays.

And so it went for two years, until one day he left and he never came back.

But in a way, he never left, did he?

That's why I didn't want to open that box. I didn't want to deal with it, any of it. I knew there were tightly-knotted balls of pain buried deep down inside of me. They'd been there for years and years, since long before my dad left, going all the way back to when Mom was still alive and I'd hear them argue and him beat her. I'd buried all that hurt inside me where I didn't have to deal with it. I didn't want to open that box. I didn't want to touch those places, those memories. I wanted to let them be, and to let sleeping dogs lie. But Bones insisted that I open it.

Because she knew.

She knew that I had to had to reach inside at some point and touch those places, to finally begin to untie those knots and make sense of the memories, if not for my sake, then for hers and—even more importantly—for the sake of our unborn child.

"Quantum physicists have postulated that the way we experience time is an illusion," Bones told me. "That it doesn't happen in a linear way, that past and present, in reality, there's no difference."

I sat back in my easy chair and could feel my head ache as my temples tightened and throbbed. "Bones, what are you trying to get at?" I asked her, my voice somewhere between a growl and a sigh.

"You do have some good memories of your father," she told me. "You told me about them. There was the time when the river froze. He woke you up at midnight to go skating. And the time you were sweeping up at his barber shop when he put on Louis Prima and he pretended that the electric razor was a microphone."

I couldn't help but laugh a little. I remembered my father's voice. He had a good singing voice—a baritone like mine, but he was better at carrying a tune than I ever was—and I remembered standing there leaning against the broom and watching him sing 'Just a Gigolo' into that electric razor which reeked of Barbicide.

_I'm just a gigolo and everywhere I go,  
__People know the part I'm playin'.  
__Pay for every dance, sellin' each romance,  
__Ooohh what they're sayin'?  
__There will come a day, when youth will pass away,  
__What will they say about me?_

I blinked away the memory and looked up at my partner, my beautiful partner whose face glowed with love and patience and the shine of a woman six months pregnant with our child. She turned her head and gestured towards the stadium seats on the other side of the room with a slight jerk of her chin and a soft smile.

"And the World Series..."

I felt the lump in my throat swell as my nostrils burned with emotion. I remembered it like it was yesterday. It was October 21st, 1980: Game Six of the World Series, which ended with Tug McGraw striking out Willie Wilson at 11:29 pm, giving my team, the Philadelphia Phillies, their first World Series win ever. And I was there that night, sitting in Veterans Stadium with my dad, who'd managed to give up drinking for short two weeks that fall and make his little boy's dream come true. I looked at those stadium seats and tried to will away the tears that were welling up in my eyes as I thought about that night.

"Your one perfect day together."

If it was all bad—if every memory I ever had of my father was negative, full of pain and violence—it'd be easier, in a way. It's the fact that there were some good times, and that I still have a few positive memories of him, despite everything he did to me, to my mother, and to my brother, that makes it so hard to figure out how I'm supposed to feel about his death. Am I supposed to be glad? Am I supposed to be sad? If I don't feel sad, does that make me a bad person? I looked at those stadium seats and sighed. She was right.

So I went there. I opened the box.

As I sifted through the contents of that little wooden box with her by my side, I felt the hardness, the tightness inside of me, soften a little as a tear fell from my eye. I've only broken down and cried twice in all the years since the afternoon my father pushed me down that staircase, and both times, I'd cried in front of her. She, and she alone, had seen me open myself up that way. Truth is, I don't think I could have gone through that box and sifted through the memories that swirled around each of the little objects inside of it—the photograph of me and Dad sitting in the backyard of our duplex at Fort Campbell; the picture of us walking out onto the pond, me all bundled up in a down jacket and winter cap, waddling onto the ice in skates; the card I'd made him at school with all the glitter and my name scrawled in magic marker; and his Purple Heart, earned when his helicopter was shot out of the sky and crash-landed on the banks of a muddy river in South Vietnam—if it weren't for her. If she hadn't have been there with me.

She makes me feel like I'm whole, like I'm not damaged, even when the feelings I don't want to feel bubble up and gnaw at me from the inside out. That night, I lay next to her in bed after we'd made love, with my body curled behind hers and my hand resting on the round swell of her pregnant belly. I heard her breathing slow down and she began to make her soft little snoring sounds that told me she was asleep.

I felt a heavy feeling low in my gut, but it felt different than before. Still heavy, I guess, but somehow—for reasons I'm not sure I understand—not as dark. And not as hard. I had all of these emotions swirling around inside of me, not the least of which was love for the woman whose bottom was tucked snug against my hips as she slept, but I felt strangely unafraid.

Bones pushes me. It's what she does. It's what she's always done, and it's probably part of what makes us so great together. She gently nudges me to go where I need to go, to do what I need to do, and to be the man she knows I can be. That night, she pushed me, reluctant as I was to do it, to open that box, and in so doing, to open myself up and start dealing with all the memories of my father, good and bad. She pushed me to do it, and it was the right thing.

Don't get me wrong. I still haven't sorted through all of the stuff inside of me about my dad and what happened when I was a kid. The things that happened—good and bad, all of it—will always be a part of me.

As I lay there in bed, I felt our unborn daughter beneath my palm, and I knew what I had to do. I want our little girl to have the best of everything, and the best of me. To do that, I will have to push through all of this, to make sense of it and to come out the other side. I may never figure it all out, but somehow, I need to deal with it. To get my head as straight as I can. I have to try. I want to be a better father for her than my dad was for me, or even than I've been able to be for my son Parker. It won't be easy, but I think, with Bones there to catch me when I fall, I can do it.

For both of them. And for me.

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**A/N: ** _What did you think of what one? It had angst but it also warmth, I think, and it ended on a positive note. I hope you found it useful in filling in the emotional gaps that we were left with at the end of the episode._

_I'm always a little nervous about these pieces in which nothing really happens_—_where all of the "action" is inside of a character's mind_—_so I really want to know how I did. I'd be grateful if you'd take a minute to review._

_Seriously, getting reviews means I know people are reading this stuff. And knowing that people are reading makes me want to write more of it._

_So please, leave a review. Even a teeny tiny quick one would be wonderful. Please? *pleading Boothy puppy dog eyes*_

**Editorial note: **_The winter of 1976-1977 really was a bitterly cold one, cold enough that the Ohio River (which runs through the west part of Pittsburgh) did actually freeze over. So little Seeley Booth really could have skated on the frozen river while living in Pittsburgh. Don't believe me? Google it :-)_


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